House of Lords Read online

  PHILIP ROSENBERG

  HOUSE OF LORDS

  To the memory of my father

  Who was always there for us

  And always will be.

  OSCAR ROSENBERG

  October 10, 1910–March 9, 1995

  The greatest gambling enterprise in the United States has not been significantly touched by organized crime. That is the stock market…The reason is that the market works too well.

  —THOMAS SCHELLING

  Contents

  Epigraph

  Part One

  1

  Jeffrey Blaine gave himself a moment to take it all…

  2

  In her mind, if not out loud, Sharon Lamm was…

  3

  The band had been told that they didn’t have to…

  Part Two

  4

  Chet Fiore’s Mercedes wasn’t on the street when he came…

  5

  Let me get this straight,” Dennis Franciscan was saying

  6

  They didn’t get out of the restaurant until three

  7

  Schliester and Gogarty went out for breakfast after getting their asses…

  Part Three

  8

  Jeffrey read the last paragraph a second time

  9

  If the phone rang, there wouldn’t have been anyone to…

  10

  Wally Schliester bought himself a whole set of lightweight…

  11

  Even before the doorbell rang, Elaine Lester felt that something…

  12

  On a Wednesday afternoon late in June, Jennie buzzed Jeffrey in…

  Part Four

  13

  Eddie Vincenzo was beginning to think it was a stupid idea…

  14

  She knocked on Jeffrey’s door first.

  15

  The next time Jessica called home she was more talkative…

  16

  Wally Schliester liked wandering around the convention-hall floor when he…

  17

  They met on the outdoor observation deck of the Staten…

  18

  It took only a week for Chet Fiore to double his money.

  19

  Good morning, Mr. Blaine,” Jennifer said, handing Jeffrey his messages.

  Part Five

  20

  The night before Clint Bolling’s funeral, a captain from the…

  21

  Gus Benini lived in half of a little postwar two-family…

  22

  It Was almost six o’clock when Chet Fiore showed up…

  23

  When Gus Benini didn’t get in touch with Schliester For…

  24

  Ailing someone in New York City is the easiest thing in the world.

  Part Six

  25

  The voice at the other end of the line was almost incoherent.

  26

  Phyllis padded into the kitchen and turned on the cappuccino…

  27

  Schliester and Gogarty were back in the office by noon.

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Praise

  Other Books by Philip Rosenberg

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  PART ONE

  1

  Jeffrey Blaine gave himself a moment to take it all in.

  His eyes ran quickly from the bar on his right to the tables that glowed with gold and russet wildflowers all the way to the bandstand at the far end of the room. People were still coming in, the men brushing snow from their shoulders, the women carefully lifting the plastic covers they had put over their hair, the girls gloriously shaking their heads, letting the melting droplets spray anyone lucky enough to be around.

  In a minute he would check outside, to make sure the streets were being kept clear. Now he just wanted to take stock.

  Judge Borklund and his wife found Jessica and kissed her, offering their congratulations. She glowed in their admiration. Her closest friends, Renée and Amy and Grace, hovered by her bare, smooth shoulder, smiling restlessly, the bored glow of perfect and beautiful girls when a party hasn’t yet come alive. In a minute the greetings will be over and the guest of honor won’t have to hear again how radiant she is and how splendid the room looks and how utterly unbelievable it is that anyone could actually have her birthday party at a restaurant like Stasny’s (as though there were a restaurant like Stasny’s), and Does she know how lucky she is? and Nonsense, dear, she deserves every bit of it, and How did your father ever manage to get this place?

  The band would be playing in a few minutes. Their instruments were already on the bandstand, which had been erected for the occasion at the side of the room nearest the kitchen. The musicians weren’t in sight, though. They came out, set up, and then withdrew back to the kitchen.

  Jeffrey watched his daughter as she luxuriated in the certainty of being, for this moment at least, the center of the known universe. Outside, he knew, the photographers who were kept penned behind police barricades on the other side of the street, who were limited to long-lens shots of Jeffrey Blaine’s guests, or Jessica Blaine’s guests, as they arrived, would have killed for a picture of the radiant Jessica being kissed by the Jacob Krentses, shaking the hands of the Willard Botins, bending her long Botticelli neck to listen to a whispered confidence from Itzhak Perlman.

  A waiter slid up beside Jeffrey with a tray of the braised stuffed mushrooms that were one of Stasny’s more celebrated hors d’oeuvres. Jeffrey waved the man off and walked briskly toward the back of the room. He was captured on the way by Ed Wuorinen but hesitated just long enough for a handshake from Ed and a kiss from Ed’s wife Thelma. “I’ll be right back,” he said, apologizing for running off. As he turned to go, his hand was caught by Wilton Maser, who said, “I won’t take your time, you must have a million things to do. Your daughter’s beautiful, everything’s beautiful,” and Jeffrey said, “Wilton, since when do you know anything about what’s beautiful?” They both laughed.

  Jeffrey threaded his way through the busy kitchen toward the office. He had told the band he would want to talk to them before they started, and so they were waiting for him, the four of them, sprawled across the available space in Erill Stasny’s private office as though they imagined themselves to be common fixtures one would find in any well-run kitchen. Their names were Johnny Balls, Ted Diddle, Bo Job, and Jake August. They called themselves Falling Rock Zone, and the one named Johnny Balls, who identified himself as the lead singer, had a tattoo of a penis that ran the length of his upper arm. It seemed to Jeffrey that they were nowhere near as young as they wanted to appear. He guessed that Jake August, who said he was the bassist, was at least thirty if not up into his thirties, and the others weren’t much younger. A jumble of facial hardware and a lot of streaky black makeup that made them look like demented raccoons were all apparently designed to put them into a much younger bracket.

  “You know there’s no amplification,” Jeffrey reminded them.

  “Right, right,” Johnny Balls agreed.

  “I wanted to ask you about your lyrics.”

  “Like what about them?”

  “Well”—Jeffrey stumbled, not quite sure how to pose the question—“what about obscenity?”

  “Some.”

  “Some?”

  “You got words you don’t want us to say? How about cunt? We won’t say cunt. Okay, guys, no cunt.”

  The others all agreed, each of them repeating “No cunt” like a mantra.

  “That isn’t exactly what I meant,” Jeffrey said.

  Johnny Balls raised an eyebrow, waiting. Two rings and a stud raised with it.

  “I was
more concerned with violence,” Jeffrey said.

  “For or against?”

  Now it was Jeffrey’s turn not to answer.

  “Sorry, man, just jakin’,” the singer said. “You mean like kill pigs and knife the bitch, that kind of shit. That’s rap. We don’t do rap.”

  “What do you do?”

  “You won’t like it,” Johnny Balls said, with the first sign of candor he had displayed so far. “But the kids will. That’s the point, right?”

  “Part of the point.”

  “Right. You don’t want to be getting a lot of shit from a lot of people.”

  “Now you’ve got it.”

  “But it’s got to be real, right? ’Cause we can do wedding shit if you want. ‘Hava Nagilah.’ ‘September Song.’ Which sucks. You don’t want that.”

  “Right,” Jeffrey agreed. “It’s got to be real.”

  Phyllis was talking to Everett Layne, the only surviving direct descendant of either Jacob Layne or Ezra Vaughan Bentley, the long dead founders of Layne Bentley, the investment firm in which her husband was now a partner. Jeffrey came up behind her and slipped his arm around her waist. Everett Layne greeted him with a thin-lipped smile and said something gracious about the party.

  In his early eighties now, the gaunt old patriarch came into the office only once a week. He had never before been known to attend the social functions of the firm’s partners, yet here he was, still wearing his overcoat, a plaid wool muffler around his neck. His servant Gregory, a man of almost his own age, stood mutely at his shoulder. Obviously Mr. Layne wouldn’t be staying, but for Jeffrey it was a triumph of sorts that he had at least deigned to put in an appearance. Everett Layne was ratifying Jeffrey’s unique position at the firm.

  Phyllis glanced at her husband with a radiant smile the moment she felt the touch of his hand. She was wearing pale gold silk, a magnificent dress that followed the still-perfect lines of her body the way a man’s hands would, caressing her thighs and hips. She was, Jeffrey realized, still quite beautiful, in fact the most beautiful woman he knew. She leaned her body to his, subtly, not suggestively, just enough to put anyone looking on notice that Jeffrey and Phyllis Blaine had the perfect marriage. Jeffrey returned her smile. There were moments like this, not many of them, but enough to unnerve him, when she put on that perfect smile and made her perfect body touch his, that made him realize how easy it might have been to be still in love with her.

  “Mr. Layne was just telling me that he finds the music surprisingly pleasant,” she said.

  “Indeed,” the old man said. “But why must they look like that?”

  Jeffrey laughed. Phyllis laughed. They looked at each other as they laughed, sharing the pleasure of being together for the wittiest thing they had ever heard in their lives.

  Not far away, Jim Thornton peered over the top of his whiskey glass and gestured with a slight waggle of his head toward where the old man was standing with the Blaines. Holden Martins and Todd Wynebrook looked in the direction indicated. All three of them were partners at Layne Bentley. Everett Layne hadn’t attended Wynebrook’s wedding, or Thornton’s either, for that matter, and that was almost ten years ago, when he was a much younger man still putting in a full week at the office. They looked at each other, trying to decide how they should feel about his appearance at Blaine’s daughter’s birthday party.

  “Way to go, Jeffrey,” Wynebrook said at last, raising his glass.

  Thornton, who had been on the verge of giving voice to his envy, thought better of it. It wouldn’t have sat right. No one begrudged Jeffrey Blaine his success. There was something about the man that simply made you feel happy for him.

  Or at least that’s what you were supposed to feel.

  Clint Bolling came out of the men’s room and looked around, like a man getting off a train. He sighed. This party had all the earmarks of a waste of time, but at least he felt a lot better. There was a slight buzz between his ears that just might be enough to turn a goddamned birthday party for a teenage girl he had never met into a decent enough way to spend an evening two thousand miles from home.

  He had been here since eight o’clock even though he knew it was stupid showing up exactly at eight just because Blaine told him eight. It was just that he hated hotel rooms. For some reason he felt obliged to put in an appearance because Blaine invited him. If he had to guess, he would guess that Blaine had that effect on most people. They wanted to do what he wanted them to do. The guy was just so fucking sincere it made your skin crawl. The fact of the matter was that Blaine wanted to be his banker. By rights Jeffrey Blaine should be kissing his ass, not dragging him off to kiddie parties.

  What the hell, Bolling thought. If he wasn’t here, where would he be? Probably picking up a cocktail waitress, for Christ’s sake. He was better off here, where he could avoid temptation. Or at least, if there was going to be temptation, it would be with a better class of people.

  He spent his first hour at the party trying to find a reason why he shouldn’t simply find Blaine, shake his hand, thank him for the invite, and leave. Now he was feeling better about everything.

  At least a dozen teenage girls rushed passed him, heading somewhere in a hurry. He looked around for a movie star or a rock star or something.

  The girls all looked delicious, teenage girls at that age when a female can look innocent and blatant at the same time, their hair sleek and dramatic, brilliantly blond or midnight black, cropped short like show dogs, flared back from their faces as though they had been caught in a sharp, surprising wind, their eyes and lips bathed in colors like exotic insects. Maybe he’d ask one of them to dance.

  The headlong rush of all these girls in evening dresses, Clint Bolling discovered, was aimed at a rather remarkable looking young woman in her middle twenties who wasn’t dressed for this kind of party at all. She was wearing a sheepskin coat and a peasant skirt that reached down to the floor, the kind of thing Bolling’s wife wore all the time back in Oklahoma. She also had on burgundy-red calf-high boots, and she had that magical kind of presence that announced that she was someone, certainly someone Clint Bolling wouldn’t have minded getting to know.

  “I think it’s Mia Hamm,” he heard a woman say. The name meant nothing to Bolling. He turned to see who had spoken, and his eyes and the tilt of his head asked the next question. “The soccer player,” she explained.

  The soccer player, Bolling thought. Why in god’s holy name would a bunch of teenagers be excited about a soccer player? Bolling had only a vague memory of a female soccer team that had done something illustrious a year or so ago, maybe more. Typical, he thought. A man like Blaine would pick up the phone and call a soccer player he didn’t even know simply because his little girl probably played the game. Or maybe he called her agent. Did soccer players have agents? Probably. Everybody had agents. She probably charged for showing up.

  Still, it was an opportunity not to be missed. He liked athletic women, even though they made him feel his age. Under that sheepskin coat there was undoubtedly a great body, firm and relentless.

  He squared off his shoulders and moved forward to introduce himself. He was conscious of cutting an impressive figure in his lizard boots and string tie. He had been born and raised in Oklahoma and he still lived there, so he enjoyed a sort of natural right to the rough-and-ready cowboy air he affected. Still, it was an affectation. Like an actor playing himself in a film, he often found himself weighing his words and actions not so much in terms of what should be said or done under the circumstances, but more in terms of what Clint Bolling would say or do. For as long as he could remember, this double consciousness had been part of his being. At eighteen he carried it with him when he enrolled at Yale, eight years before Jeffrey Blaine’s freshman year. Beyond the fact of their Yale educations, however, the two men had little in common. Bolling came east with a firm and almost fanatical resolve to let nothing he learned there change him, a pledge that was, if anything, solidified when he found himself surrounded by hundred
s of guys like Jeffrey Blaine, blond and good-looking small-town bearers of civic pride who showed up precisely to collect on the college’s implicit promise to change everything.

  Four years after he came east to be a Yale freshman, Clint Bolling was able to return to Oklahoma essentially a wilier version of the youth who left. He was for this reason understandably reluctant to credit his Ivy League education with any significant role in sharpening the skills that enabled him to amass an incredible fortune over the next two and a half decades. He didn’t own oil but his company was sitting on about a hundred patents for interesting things to do with oil. No one, including Bolling, actually knew what all of them were, but that didn’t matter. Some of them had to do with medicine, while others involved food actually synthesized out of petrochemicals. There was a lot of interest, which translated into an explosive rise in the value of Clint Bolling’s company, PetroBoll.

  The story of how Bolling came to control these patents told a great deal about the man. He raided the petrochemistry departments of three large universities in Texas and Oklahoma by offering immense cash donations that the fortunate institutions eagerly transformed into libraries, laboratories, and endowed professorships. None of the scientists involved ever knowingly went to work for Clint Bolling or PetroBoll. They all remained in the employ of their universities, even though a series of Bolling trusts paid their salaries. But the fine print in the deeds of trust that created the funds turned out to give the trusts, which in turn turned out to be PetroBoll under a series of other names, the patents on the work products generated by the recipients of the trusts’ generosity. No one but Bolling had understood that this would be the case at the time the gifts were made and accepted. Naturally, the universities bellowed like bulls when they realized what was happening. The courts, though, upheld Bolling, although they went out of their way in each separate ruling to cluck their judicial tongues about the sharp practices on the one hand and the slovenly lawyering on the other that forced them to such unpleasant but unavoidable conclusions.